How Crimson Hexagon Increased Productivity by 82%

Guest post by Noel Baylor, Partner Manager @ Crimson Hexagon

Guest bio

Noel is an energetic digital media fanatic, with a diverse background in Technology Partnerships and Channel Sales. When she’s not developing partner strategies or attending industry conferences, you can find Noel enjoying live music or hiking around New England. Follow Noel on Twitter @Media_Banter.

About Crimson Hexagon

At Crimson Hexagon, we focus on delivering actionable social insights for the enterprise. This month we will surpass 1-trillion indexed posts, giving our users access to the largest data set of any social analysis platform.

Our product, ForSight, enables users to analyze conversations to surface trends, find market influencers, and measure the emotional sentiment of consumers. The platform can even be trained with our machine learning algorithm to further categorize the conversation, as shown in the following screenshot.

Growing pains

At the start of 2013, we suffered through growing pains as we tried to keep up with the analysis demand that came with our expanding customer base. With the sharp increase in demand for social media insights from our ForSight platform came spikes in analysis load. At times we were vulnerable to congestion, so analysis run times became unpredictable. We needed to be able to scale our data and analysis resources to meet this demand. Our goal was to enable any monitor to run insights in an hour or less, no matter the concurrent load of historical data.

Why Crimson Hexagon chose the AWS platform

When considering new service offerings, AWS was the clear choice. The initial migration to AWS allowed us to quickly scale our offering and reduce run times by 82%. Using their extensive API, we accommodated our customer needs by dynamically provisioning computing capacity in response to spikes in ForSight analysis demand. We also implemented Amazon SQS to decouple our data, alongside our own internal task queue to accommodate all of our in-depth services.

More data, faster speeds

Thanks to AWS, Crimson Hexagon has been able to easily scale our infrastructure while the size of our social index has more than doubled over the last few years. We can offer our clients access to as much data as they like without limitations on keywords or volume, unlike our competition. Moreover, in recent testing, our median report run time has now been reduced by 97% since initial implementation.